In 1848, Dostoevsky was not yet the tortured genius the world would learn to fear and venerate. He was just a young 27-year-old Russian writer, too sensitive to the brutality around him and too talented to be ignored for long.
Before the fall
Anyone who reads Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov finds an author who has already delved into the depths of human guilt, who has already deciphered the abysses of faith, madness and redemption. None of this existed when Dostoevsky wrote White Nights. He had not yet faced the firing squad that almost took his life and, ironically, gave him back his soul. It was too early for the existentialist darkness that would mark his mature work.
Success and silence
What Dostoevsky had, in 1848, was the success of his first novel, Poor Folk. His name grew in the literary salons of Saint Petersburg, but at the same time that his fame spread, something in his soul retreated. The winds of criticism were already blowing, and with them the first signs of the censorship that would mark much of his life as a Russian writer.
He was a romantic artist, in love with dreams, who walked through a silent Saint Petersburg, enveloped in French ideas. The influence of Balzac and Victor Hugo mixed with the late echoes of European sentimentalism, the current that still insisted on treating the heart as a subject worthy of literature, before the cruelest realism took over the scene.
A city and a light
It is from this liminal moment, between applause and introspection, between the illness that already haunted him and an anguish that he himself did not yet fully understand, that White Nights was born. The city that frames the novel, with its nights that never get completely dark, works almost like a portrait of the author himself: a man suspended, between the day that insists on staying and the night that is reluctant to begin.
The Dostoevsky of White Nights still did not shout. He sighed. It is this whisper, and not the screams that would come later, that the Nous class on the work invites you to listen to closely.
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See recommended readingsFrequently asked questions
How old was Dostoevsky when he wrote White Nights?
Twenty-seven years. It was 1848, a year before the episode that would change his life forever and decades before the great novels that would consecrate him.
Had Dostoevsky already faced the firing squad when he wrote White Nights?
No. In 1848 this episode, which almost took his life and which he himself would describe as the moment in which his soul was returned to him, was still to come.
What had Dostoevsky already published before White Nights?
Poor Folk, his debut novel, which brought him immediate success and a growing name in the literary salons of Saint Petersburg.
Continue: White Nights, by Dostoevsky · The White Nights Dreamer · The dreamers of European Romanticism · Capitoline and Caravaggio Museums
Source class (YouTube): Noites Brancas, de Fiódor Dostoiévski (NousCast)